Dhe elegant understatement is Emmanuel Carrère’s central stylistic device. Anyone who follows “Yoga”, the title of his latest novel, and expects a gentle, spiritual book should be warned by the predecessor “Everything is true” (2009): There Carrère reports on the tsunami of 2004, which he witnessed in Sri Lanka and adds caustic digs at a group of Swiss-German Ayurveda devotees who are pursuing their practices in chaos and suffering as if nothing had happened. Destruction breaks out again in the latest novel: The project of a yoga book is sabotaged by the physical violence of Islamist attacks and the psychological violence of a depressive breakdown. In the end everything is fragile: style, book project and psyche.
About the initial project: With the intention of disciplining his own ego and writing “a cheerful, subtle little book about yoga”, the first-person narrator went to the Morvan in January 2015 to do a Vipassana course there. The requirement: ten days of isolation, silence, diet, meditation. He describes the first two days and weaves in what tai chi and yoga mean to him; he attempts definitions, reports on experiences such as a tai chi lesson in Canada watched by a wolf, or a hot sex affair after an intensive course. He depicts himself and the others in search of inner peace: a Carrère showpiece that, seemingly harmless, explores the human-all-too-human with caustic understanding and secures a well-deserved place as a “mountain with cows” meditator.
crisis and collapse
The first part ends abruptly: the “Charlie Hebdo” attacks force the narrator to leave because he has to deliver the eulogy for his murdered friend Bernard Maris. The crisis culminates in a mental breakdown with no clear chronology or causality—an odd gap. In any case, he goes through a depression that leads to a four-month stay in psychiatry. He is diagnosed with tachypsychia – “something like a racing heart, only for mental activity” – as part of a bipolar II disorder; because of the suicidal wishes, the narrator undergoes electroconvulsive therapy. Parts four and five report on the difficult new beginning: The narrator helps to teach refugee boys on a Greek island. Finally, Carrère reports on the last contacts with his longtime publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens and the writing of the novel, which finally succeeds after several attempts.
After “The Kingdom” (2014), “Yoga” was a long-awaited work and a favorite for the Prix Goncourt 2020. A polemic broke out in September of that year, which, among other things, raised the question of whether “Yoga” is a novel at all . When rumors circulated of interventions that would explain gaps in the text, journalist Hélène Devynck, Carrère’s wife from 2011 to 2020, exercised her right of reply. In “Vanity Fair” she recalled the contract that forbids Carrère to make her private life public without her consent. “Yoga” did not respect this agreement and distorted reality: a few days with refugees had been stretched out to two months and postponed (in fact, they had taken place before the psychiatric stay); aggressive behavior during the illness is downplayed, family support is suppressed. The polemic probably cost Goncourt chances.
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